And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them. Karnak’s big, rusty head lolled in its neck socket.

“Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand.”

“Then, Masha, bring supper: three portions, the humectant, the spirits and wine… No, wait a minute… No, it doesn’t matter. Go along.”

As they ate, Nikolai coughed and spat big clumps of mucous onto the floor, and Levin noticed a second gray pustule, slightly larger than the first, throbbing on his brother’s cheek. It was difficult to eat.

“Yes, of course,” said Konstantin Levin, as his brother rambled about some new idea he had, a theory about forming a new membership association for Class IIIs. He tried not to look at the patch of red that had come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.

“Why such an association? What use is it?”

“Why? Because robots have been made slaves, just as the peasants once were in the time of the Tsars! We feel we can treat them as objects, because we have created them, but we created them to possess consciousness, and to have free will-”

“Free will as bounded by the Iron Laws,” Levin reminded his brother.

“Yes, yes, the Iron Laws. But free will they nevertheless possess, free will of a kind. And just as God made man to pursue his own ends as he saw fit, surely we must allow magnificent automatons like these to try and get out of their slavery,” said Nikolai, exasperated by the objection. He gestured to Karnak, as if his own Class III’s magnificence were evidence enough-and at that moment one of Karnak’s arms fell off with a weak, tinny clank.

Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolai still more.

It became increasingly difficult for Nikolai even to speak, as he was consumed by a series of shuddering coughs. Finally he stepped out onto the landing to expectorate mightily over the side; he found enjoyment, he announced wickedly, evacuating his sputum onto passing sledges-he considered it the one small pleasure that life had still afforded him.

Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

“Have you been long with my brother?” he said to her.

“Yes, more than a year.” She lowered her voice, turning away from Karnak’s sensors, although it seemed to Levin that they were pitifully befogged and incapable of registering much. “Nikolai Dmitrich’s health has become very poor. Nikolai Dmitrich drinks a great deal,” she said.

“That is… how does he drink?”

“Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”

“And a great deal?” whispered Levin.

“Yes,” she said, looking timidly toward the doorway, where Nikolai Levin had reappeared. Soon he resumed his tired oration, turning to a bizarre warning that: “If we do not allow robots to control their own destiny, they will control ours.” But his speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin, with the help of Masha, persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and he departed. As he and Socrates descended the creaky stairs, Levin considered his suspicion that there was something wrong with his brother far beyond the effects of drink, and wondered what exactly it could be.

CHAPTER 21

IN THE MORNING Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he reached home. On his journey on the Grav he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new gravways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw the cyclopian II/Coachman/47-T, its sturdy torso perfectly perpendicular at the controls; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own four-treaded Puller at its head, trimmed with rings and tassels; when the Coachman mechanically relayed the village news, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.

Then, riding on the coach from the Grav station, came the heat: the radiating warmth of the pit, his pit, which he began to feel on his skin several versts before his massive groznium mine came into view. At last, there it was, a vast and craggy crater blasted out of the countryside. The pit was half a verst long and twice again as wide, its rough rock walls sloping down into a rutted rock-lined bottom, which was dotted with a thousand small smelting fires, which rung twenty-four hours a day with the clang of pickaxes and shovels.

Konstantin Levin climbed from the sledge, waved robustly to a gang of Pitbots with their battered but firm charcoal bodies and wide treads, donned his goggles, and stood at the outer radius of the pit. As he stared down into the vast crater, watching his dozens of diligent Pitbots at work, diligent and industrious as honeybees, scurrying to and fro, churning up the Earth with their axes, he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away.

He took a last breath of the sulfurous air and walked with Socrates to the house from the side of the pit. As they walked, Levin expressed to his Class III his new resolutions.

“In the first place, from this day I will give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness,” he said. “Such as marriage might have given me.”

“One, no happiness for you,” Socrates parroted faithfully, his master’s use of the set phrase “in the first place” having activated his recording/retaining function-set.

“Consequently I will not so disdain what I really have.”

“Subset of one: no happiness equals no disdain.”

“Secondly, I will never again let myself give way to low passion, the memory of which tortured me so while I was making up my mind to make an offer.”

“Two: absence of low passion.”

Then Levin remembered his brother Nikolai, and made one further resolution. “I will never allow myself to forget him, Socrates.”

“Three: Nikolai preservation dedication.”

“I will follow him up, and not lose sight of him. I will be ready to help if his illness should continue to worsen.”

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom window of his old mécanicienne, Agafea Mihalovna. She was not yet asleep.

“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna as Levin and Socrates entered.

“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and, together with his beloved-companion, went into his study.

CHAPTER 22

COME, IT’S ALL OVER, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when at the Moscow Grav Station she bid good-bye to her brother, who stood blocking the entrance to the carriage till the third bell was heard. She sat down on her lounge beside Android Karenina, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping carriage.

On the morning after the float, Anna Arkadyevna had sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.

“No, I must go, I must go.” She had explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “No, it had really better be today!”

Stepan Arkadyich came to see his sister off at seven o’clock. Kitty had not come, sending a note that she had a headache.

“Thank God!” Anna murmured to her beloved-companion as they settled in the carriage. “Tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”